Specific recurring transaction not downloading from Citi

cheli007

Downloads from Citibank are working fine other than one weekly recurring transaction which will not download, regardless of whether it is already manually entered in register. Any ideas? Thanks.

jacobs

UKR said:

AFAIK, Mac users must perform a review / mark reviewed process on each downloaded transaction, different from Windows users. If not marked, a downloaded transaction would hang in limbo for about 2 weeks until auto-marked as reviewed by Quicken. Could this be what's impacting this weekly transaction?  I'm just shooting into the dark here ...

That's not the way Quicken Mac works. Downloads are instantly processed into the appropriate register, and no further action is required to review or approve the downloads. The two-week thing you describe has to do with how long the downloaded transaction has a blue dot in the status column, which can make it easier for the user to review recent downloads. (They can also last longer than two weeks.) But no action on the part of a user is required. 

As for the problem @cheli007 is reporting, it sounds like the issue is that the transaction simply isn't downloading into Quicken at all. My only guess is whether Citi for some reasons treats this recurring transaction as the same one and assigns it the same transaction ID (FITID) each time. Quicken keeps a record of all FITID numbers to prevent duplicate downloads, so if it receives a nw transaction with an already-used FITID, Quicken ignores it. Proving whether this is what's happening requires digging into the transaction download logs…

On the Help menu, select Show Logs in Finder. In the Finder window, you want the one called "OFXLog.txt". Now comes the fun part: deciphering the log! The most recent transactions are at the bottom, so this process can be easier if you open the file in a text application which can search backwards (such as MS Word). Search for the name of the Payee for this recurring transaction, and then look for the FITID just above it. Then continue searching backward for the next instance of this Payee, and look at the FITID number is the same or different. If it's the same, that's your smoking gun: Citi is improperly transmitting different instances of this transaction with the same FITID number, which causes Quicken to ignore it. You'd have to pursue this with Citi, and hope you can get to someone in their tech support department who understands their OFX download process.

All of the above is just a guess as to a possible cause; it may turn out to be a dead end. It was just the only thing I could think of which would account for downloads working properly except for this one recurring transaction.

UKR

More details about this particular transaction, please.

Are you manually reviewing and accepting downloaded transactions or are you hoping for Quicken to do it right, automagically?

AFAIK, Mac users must perform a review / mark reviewed process on each downloaded transaction, different from Windows users. If not marked, a downloaded transaction would hang in limbo for about 2 weeks until auto-marked as reviewed by Quicken. Could this be what's impacting this weekly transaction?  I'm just shooting into the dark here ...

cheli007

Hmm. My transactions have always immediately been marked as cleared after downloading since I've started using Quicken Mac. I've certainly never done anything like that and they've all been available right away. To answer your question, quicken always has just done it right in the past.

jacobs

UKR said:

AFAIK, Mac users must perform a review / mark reviewed process on each downloaded transaction, different from Windows users. If not marked, a downloaded transaction would hang in limbo for about 2 weeks until auto-marked as reviewed by Quicken. Could this be what's impacting this weekly transaction?  I'm just shooting into the dark here ...

That's not the way Quicken Mac works. Downloads are instantly processed into the appropriate register, and no further action is required to review or approve the downloads. The two-week thing you describe has to do with how long the downloaded transaction has a blue dot in the status column, which can make it easier for the user to review recent downloads. (They can also last longer than two weeks.) But no action on the part of a user is required. 

As for the problem @cheli007 is reporting, it sounds like the issue is that the transaction simply isn't downloading into Quicken at all. My only guess is whether Citi for some reasons treats this recurring transaction as the same one and assigns it the same transaction ID (FITID) each time. Quicken keeps a record of all FITID numbers to prevent duplicate downloads, so if it receives a nw transaction with an already-used FITID, Quicken ignores it. Proving whether this is what's happening requires digging into the transaction download logs…

On the Help menu, select Show Logs in Finder. In the Finder window, you want the one called "OFXLog.txt". Now comes the fun part: deciphering the log! The most recent transactions are at the bottom, so this process can be easier if you open the file in a text application which can search backwards (such as MS Word). Search for the name of the Payee for this recurring transaction, and then look for the FITID just above it. Then continue searching backward for the next instance of this Payee, and look at the FITID number is the same or different. If it's the same, that's your smoking gun: Citi is improperly transmitting different instances of this transaction with the same FITID number, which causes Quicken to ignore it. You'd have to pursue this with Citi, and hope you can get to someone in their tech support department who understands their OFX download process.

All of the above is just a guess as to a possible cause; it may turn out to be a dead end. It was just the only thing I could think of which would account for downloads working properly except for this one recurring transaction.

cheli007

Thanks! Despite this being a weekly transaction, there was only one occurrence of the payee name in the logs. I'll have to contact them. Thanks again!